We’ve had some fantastic feedback during the private EAP, and Rider is now well on the way to release. While we’re not quite feature complete, and there are still a couple of rough edges, we know of many people, inside and outside of JetBrains, who are already using Rider for day-to-day development. We’d love you to try it for yourself and let us know what you think, good as well as bad – log an issue, leave us a comment or ping us on Twitter (@JetBrainsRider).

What’s Rider?

Rider is a full featured, cross platform .NET IDE based on ReSharper and IntelliJ. The front end and user interface is built on the proven IntelliJ platform, just like WebStorm or IntelliJ IDEA, and can run on Windows, Linux and Mac. But the engine that drives all of your favourite JetBrains IDE features is ReSharper, running as an out of process language server.

This is a great mixture. Both IntelliJ and ReSharper provide industry leading IDE functionality, and running ReSharper out of process frees us from sharing resources and memory with Visual Studio.

Features

So what’s in the Rider public EAP?

Rider is using ReSharper to provide language features, and our main goal has been to expose as much of this ReSharper functionality as we can for 1.0. And we’ve been building ReSharper for over 12 years, so that’s a lot.

Fortunately, the way Rider works means that a huge amount of functionality can be brought over very quickly. Rider already supports ReSharper’s rich navigation and find usages; automatic, smart and import completion; the vast majority of ReSharper’s over 2,200 inspections and over 1,000 context actions and quick fixes; as well as unit testing, solution wide analysis and more.

But of course, Rider is an IDE, and needs to implement full IDE functionality, including features that ReSharper doesn’t provide, so we also build and debug as well as handle project management – solutions, references, NuGet, and so on.

In fact, there are almost too many features to easily list, so instead, let’s take a look at a couple of different scenarios we’re targeting – .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Xamarin and Unity.

.NET developer

And because we now own the solution load process, you’ll find that it’s fast. Even better, if you edit a project file externally, Rider will quickly and automatically reload, almost without you noticing.

References are of course supported by right-clicking on the project in the Solution Explorer. Or you can use our new NuGet window to search, install and update your NuGet packages. Traditionally, this functionality is provided by Visual Studio, so it’s nice to be able to provide a typically JetBrains implementation – we cache results and update in the background, and we think you’ll be very pleased with the speed of it.

And of course Rider supports build, run and debug. Projects are built with MSBuild or XBuild if you’re running cross platform with Mono, while run and debug make use of a powerful feature of IntelliJ – Run/Debug Configurations (ReSharper has a similar feature).

Run configurations allow specifying as many different ways of launching your project as you need, and Rider offers a number of .NET specific templates for launching projects, running arbitrary executables, .NET Core and so on.

Furthermore, Rider supports debugging run configurations. This includes .NET Framework, Mono and .NET Core. Rider uses IntelliJ’s existing debugger UI, offering a familiar call stack view, as well as locals and watch variables. Rider also supports break on exception and setting the next instruction.

No IDE is complete without support for unit testing, and Rider supports running and debugging xUnit.net and NUnit tests, with a familiar user interface – icons displayed in the editor, run or debug from the Alt+Enter menu, and a tree view of running tests. Double click a test to navigate to the code, and of course, the stack traces are clickable, too.

And if you’re worried about switching to a new IDE, don’t be! Our getting started wizard will walk you through setting up Rider, including choosing keymaps that are familiar to Visual Studio and ReSharper users, and suggesting plugins to work better with your code.

.NET Core developer

Rider also supports .NET Core projects. It can open existing projects from the project.json file, or create new ones based on templates from the new project wizard.

And of course, this is all cross platform. If you want to target .NET Core on Mac, or Linux, you obviously want your tooling to be there, too. Rider will give you a full IDE on Windows, Mac and Linux.

When you open a .NET Core project, Rider will automatically restore all NuGet packages, and shows packages as a dependency tree, rather than a flat list. Once loaded, Rider provides the same rich IDE functionality as you get with a traditional .NET Framework project – code completion, navigation, refactorings, inspections and so on.

Adding a reference is as simple as editing the project.json file (with code completion, naturally) and saving; Rider will restore the packages automatically. You can swap between multiple target frameworks with a chooser in the status bar.

It also includes specific functionality for ASP.NET Core, such as Tag Helpers in .cshtml files, with code completion, find usages, and refactoring all supported.

And of course, Rider will build, run and debug your .NET Core projects, all cross platform. But please read the survival guide for known issues with adding references, debugging and unit testing.

And finally, Rider has inherited ReSharper’s ability to run and debug .NET Core unit tests. Well, mostly. This feature is not quite finished, and doesn’t work in all cases – for example, non-Windows projects that also target the .NET Framework. But it currently supports xUnit.net and NUnit, and will also support projects that target multiple frameworks. Again, please check out the survival guide.

Unity and Xamarin developers

While we’ve mostly been focused on exposing existing ReSharper functionality, and adding new, essential IDE level features such as debugging, we also want to make Rider a great IDE for developing Unity3D and Xamarin solutions.

We haven’t really got started on Xamarin support right now, although Rider already includes ReSharper’s existing Xamarin.Forms XAML editing features, with more planned.

But we’re a bit further along with Unity support. Firstly, the Unity editor can be made to open projects, C# files and error messages in Rider by adding the Unity3dRider plugin to your Unity project (this will hopefully be built into Unity in the future). See the readme in the repo for instructions on getting this set up. We’ll blog more about this very soon.

Then, once a project is open in Rider, you’ll find that there is specific Unity functionality, too. We’re bundling the ReSharper Unity plugin (yes, Rider supports plugins!), which adds a number of useful features, such as automatically setting the supported C# language level (no more C# 6 suggestions in your C# 4 code!) and inserting and auto completion of Unity message methods. See the plugin’s readme on GitHub for more details.

Furthermore, Rider will also debug your Unity project. The Run → Attach to local process menu item will show a list of available processes to debug, including available Unity instances.

Rider also includes DataGrip’s rich database tooling. This means you can open a .sql file and get smart code completion, on-the-fly analysis and quick-fixes across a huge range of databases – MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, and loads more. You can run queries, examine results and even refactor your database.

Why should you use Rider?

Hopefully, you can see that we’ve made Rider a fully fledged IDE, utilising the years of experience and functionality we’ve built into IntelliJ and ReSharper. For a pre-1.0 product, it’s already got an enormous amount of functionality.

We’re aiming to build the best IDE experience for .NET development. We want Rider to be feature rich, and we want it to be fast. And by owning the entire IDE stack, we can deliver on this, and innovate in areas that we haven’t looked at before, such as significantly improving the experience of searching in NuGet.

But the simplest answer is to download it, and try it for yourself – see how well it works for your own solutions and projects.

And remember, Rider is built from the ReSharper codebase – Rider IS ReSharper. New features and fixes in one product will flow into the other. Above all, we’re offering you a choice – if Rider works well for you, cross platform or on Windows, then great! But if you prefer Visual Studio, then rest assured, ReSharper will always be there to help you.

Oh, and one last thing. You might have noticed that we started this journey with the codename “Project Rider”, and were planning on an official name later. Well, it’s now later, and honestly, we like the name Rider. So that’s what it’s going to be – welcome toJetBrains Rider.

95 Responses to JetBrains Rider Early Access Program is now public

Been using the Rider EAP and loving it. Will Rider support the code cleanup profiles as defined within Visual Studio to automatically reformat code based on the code cleanup profile selected? I couldn’t find an option for that in the EAP. Also, will it be possible to import our existing R# code cleanup profiles as well?

I’m having some trouble launching Rider on my new laptop. It has a 1080p 13″ screen so applications are scaled by 150% their normal size. IDEA and other apps work perfectly once set up but Rider’s introductory wizard is rather unfortunately sized. Here is a screenshot showing what it looks like to me so you can understand the issue: http://imgur.com/a/lJccs

You’ll note I can’t even see the keys to go to the next page and the images in the center are cropped on the sides to fit. I can work around the issue to get the editor running in the first place but I hope this can get fixed in time for the proper release! Lots of coders out there using ultraportable laptops like I am

Rider has dotPeek built in, like ReSharper does. It will decompile on the fly, as you navigate to symbols you don’t have source for.

The profilers are a little more complicated. Firstly, they need to be work with .NET Core and Mono (we already support running on .NET Core on Windows right now), but secondly, they are very heavily WPF applications, so running them cross platform would be very difficult. One approach might be to treat other platforms as “remote”, and only allow collecting data, to be shown on a Windows machine. But yes, we’d like to see them cross platform, too.

Congrats guys. This is awesome news.
I’ve been using Rider for Unity for a while now, after a couple months using Consulo. I can’t wait to ditch the bloated windows only Visual Studio, but as of now, Xamarin.Forms development is not quite ready on Rider.
Jetbrains IDE are awesome. period.

You haven’t provided a single reason why I, as a customer, should REALLY work with Rider, and not with Visual Studio anymore. The “reasons” you listed in your blog article sound more like marketing bla bla. So, what would be the real advantage for me? Since VS 2015 Update 3, performance of Visual Studio seems to be OK under most circumstances, Rider doesn’t really seem noticeable faster to me, so this reason mostly went away.

I love Rider because it is 64 bit (and the footprint is distributed over two processes) which gives me the opportunity to load solutions which contain a huge number or projects (e.g. >1000)! This is of great help for me as I, in my architect role, very often face the challenge to know all my dependencies in the whole product or to browse the complete codebase very fast.

If there are many like me, i.e. can’t use ReSharper because it slows VS down to a crawl, the I suspect the reason for Rider is to sell Resharper on a platform that’s quicker. A decent idea if you don’t “need” VS for anything esoteric (like me). 😉

Is there any plan to support MSTest unit tests? Most of my tests are still written using MSTest which in my opinion is still standard option in Visual Studio.

Is the purpose of Rider to only support cross-platform projects or is it also supposed to be used when targeting full .NET framework? For full .NET framework, MSTest is still pretty common in my opinion?

Using Rider in prod development for one day. My first impressions are:
1. Faster than Visual Studio and Resharper.
2. Random IDE Java bugs.
3. Text editor glitches – unable to edit for a minute or need to close and open the solution again.
4. Switching git branches and reloading solution in times more faster than VS.
5. Missing some web dev plugins like LESS support.

What’s your stance on the new Visual Studio for Mac with Rider / ReSharper?
If it will support extensions, considering ReSharper is multi-platform, will you offer ReSharper for VS for Mac too?
Also, is there any reason you don’t offer R# for VS Code, given that it’s capable of operating as a stand-alone language server?

Even if these environments support extensions, reaching production-level stability of an extension as multifaceted as ReSharper in any new environment is a ton of work. We’d like to focus on (1) extending Visual Studio as the traditional and most widely used .NET dev environment, and (2) developing Rider as a standalone IDE in a shell that we own and can promptly improve as necessary.

We’re hoping to support MSTest although there are certain bundling/licensing issues: basically, we can run MSTest-based tests only if there’s a Visual Studio installation around. Here’s a feature request.

Support for T4 is something that is requested although it’s not currently clear when we can get around to implementing this.

Hi Paul. I’m afraid we haven’t built it yet! Rider ships with the default templates, and you can export your existing ones to a .dotSettings file. If you name the file after your solution (e.g. mysolution.sln.dotSettings) then Rider will automatically pick it up and use it.

Rider already supports building and running WinForms and WPF applications, and we’re currently working on UWP support. It includes XAML code completion, inspections and refactorings, but it doesn’t currently include GUI designers.

We’re planning on adding support, but it will be after v1 is released. You can track and vote on issues such as RIDER-3528, RIDER-1034 and RIDER-609.

Along the same line of thinking, do you have any idea if Jetbrains plans to release a community build of Rider? FWIW, based on early testing, I would gladly pay for a license if it’s price is similar to IDEA’s. That said, I think community involvement would be useful in the development of the product.

I was waiting for this announce, but I was very disappointed in learning that there is no Xamarin.Forms XAML Previewer in JetBrains Rider. I suppose that Xamarin Studio is still the only viable option for cross platform mobile developers like me.

Hi everyone, we are using Rider in our dev-house and we are facing a problem that debugging doesn’t show the objects values anymore, I tried to look for it but there was no luck , and Rider doesn’t allow me to install previous version, therefore we are switching to other IDEs , any idea how we could solve the problem ?

the error we get is : “Evaluation is not allowed in this thread state” , it was working fine on previous release.

Dong, can you be more specific as to what’s wrong with using static? There’s a set of reported issues around this in ReSharper (and Rider): please vote up if you’re facing one/several of them. If your problem is different, you might want to create a new issue. Thanks